The tutorial uses GitHub Action v1, which is outdated, so this needs to be upgraded to Checkout Version 2. In addition, few instructions can need clarity where the readers can pursue own learning further:

• GitHub Action Workflow Syntax
• GitHub Metadata Syntax

Reported by a learner:

Under the prerequisites section, it mentions that if you're familiar with issues and pull-requests, to take introduction to github, when I assume it should be if you're unfamiliar with issues and pull-requests.

We have renamed all the other Actions related courses to follow a convention. I'm proposing a name change to this course as well for consistency.

GitHub Actions: Hello World Using Container Actions

V2 leverages the action.yml and it is recommended in the help-docs guide.

https://help.github.com/en/actions/automating-your-workflow-with-github-actions/creating-a-javascript-action

GitHub Actions is no longer in beta! Let's remove the messaging around that in both the course details and some of the responses.

I team,

I've been running this learning lab as a workshop a few times and we've encountered a really easy fix problem.

When you add the course to your repo and make it public (I haven't tried with private repo yet), it opens the repo but it has branch protection on. This means that every time we run the course, the first thing we have to do is have all the attendees go to settings --> branches --> delete master branch protection. If we don't do this then the participant gets to stage 5 of the course and can't commit to master and therefore can't get the "congratulations" issue or "course completed" badge.

This would be a simple fix (hopefully). Adding @bdougie if you want to comment on any of the above.

saw this neat line in a Dockerfile for some of the Azure actions: RUN chmod +x /entrypoint.sh. With that line added to the Dockerfile it should not be required to clone a project to just make the entrypoint.sh executable.

Thanks to @bas for reporting this in Slack.

While going through this learning lab course for V2, I came across this line that I wasn't sure about:

Every GitHub Action runs in a Docker container and requires a Dockerfile. Let's add it now.

• https://github.com/github/hello-github-actions/blob/master/responses/00.1_first-steps.md

I'm wondering if this has been carried over from the actions v1 course?

From the docs:

You can run workflows on a GitHub-hosted virtual machine or in a Docker container. You can specify the virtual environment for each job in a workflow.

• https://help.github.com/en/articles/configuring-a-workflow#choosing-a-virtual-environment

PROBLEM

On Step 2: Add an entrypoint script, entrypoint.sh refers the variable name as $INPUT_MY_NAME. This is different from the instruction in Step 3: Add an action metadata file, where the variable name is referred as MY_NAME

SOLUTION:

Please see the associated PR request to fix the typos and error

The bot won't advance me to step 3. I added the content that was requested. Tried editing the file and also tried copy the exact contents from someone else's repo that was able to advance to step 3, but nothing seems to work. Let me know if anyone has any ideas. SamSamskies/hello-github-actions#2

The below feedback was sent to me from Harshitha, a PM intern under Usha, the product Manager for GitHub Actions for Azure.

Course Design Inputs:

• In “Hello GitHub actions” course, the first step is to create a docker file, entrypoint.sh; this is important to understand the environment, but this is not created by a user unless he/she creates a custom action. Since this is an entry level course which requires “Introduction to GitHub” as pre-requisite, introducing to docker file in the first step may not be the first use case of the new user. Rather using a starter workflow, configuring a sample action and running a workflow can be introduced first and creating a custom action can be introduced later. This may be due to the basic workflow course being inaccessible with 404 error.

Reported from a learner via email:

It was a little difficult to understand as the syntaxes were not explained and I did not understand well what exactly was going on. Later, in order to use it for my project I started reading out the documentation and I understood GitHub Actions really well. The Documentation has each and every thing explained in little details and I found it perfect.

Suggest that a little more information could be added in the Beginner Course as it will get the people more interested and will motivate junior developers and new students.